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| A relative of the victims of the EgyptAir flight 804 reacts as she makes a phone call at Charles de Gaulle Airport outside of Paris, Thursday, May 19, 2016. Egyptian aviation officials say an EgyptAir flight from Paris to Cairo with 66 passengers and crew on board has crashed. |
CAIRO
(AP) -- An EgyptAir jetliner en route from Paris to Cairo with 66 people
aboard veered wildly in flight and crashed in the Mediterranean Sea
early Thursday, authorities said. Egyptian and Russian officials said it
may have been brought down by terrorists.
There were no signs of survivors.
EgyptAir
Flight 804, an Airbus A320 with 56 passengers and 10 crew members, went
down about halfway between the Greek island of Crete and Egypt's
coastline, or around 175 miles (282 kilometers) offshore, after takeoff
from Charles de Gaulle Airport, authorities said.
Greek
Defense Minister Panos Kammenos said the plane spun all the way around
and suddenly lost altitude just before vanishing from radar screens
around 2:45 a.m. Cairo time (12:45 a.m. GMT).
He
said it made a 90-degree left turn, then a full 360-degree turn to the
right, plummeting from 38,000 feet (11,582 meters) to 15,000 feet (4,572
meters). It disappeared at about 10,000 feet (3,048 meters), he said.
There were no reports of stormy weather at the time.
Egyptian
and Greek authorities in ships and planes searched the suspected crash
area throughout the day for traces of the airliner or its victims, with
more help on the way from the U.S., Britain and France.
But
as night fell, they had yet to find any confirmed debris, at one point
dismissing a reported sighting of life vests and other floating
material.
Civil Aviation Minister Sherif Fathi
cautioned that the disaster was still under investigation but said the
possibility it was a terror attack "is higher than the possibility of
having a technical failure."
Alexander
Bortnikov, chief of Russia's top domestic security agency, went further,
saying: "In all likelihood it was a terror attack."
There was no immediate claim from militants that they had downed the plane.
If it was terrorism, it would be the second deadly attack involving Egypt's aviation industry in seven months.
Last
October, a Russian passenger plane that took off from an Egyptian Red
Sea resort crashed in the Sinai, killing all 224 people aboard. Russia
said it was brought down by a bomb, and a local branch of the Islamic
State claimed responsibility.
Thursday's
disaster also raises questions about security at De Gaulle Airport, at a
time when Western Europe has been on high alert over the deadly Islamic
extremist attacks in Paris and at the Brussels airport and subway over
the past six months.
French Foreign Minister
Jean-Marc Ayrault said that airport security had been tightened
considerably before the disaster, in part because of the coming European
soccer championship, which France is hosting.
The
Egyptian military said it did not receive a distress call from the
doomed plane, and Egypt's state-run daily Al-Ahram quoted an
unidentified airport official as saying the pilot did not send one. That
could mean that whatever sent the aircraft plummeting into the sea was
sudden.
Its erratic course suggested a number
of possible explanations, including a catastrophic mechanical or
structural failure, a bombing, or a struggle over the controls with a
hijacker in the cockpit.
Egyptian security officials said they were running background checks on the passengers to see if any had links to extremists.
In
the U.S., the FBI offered its assistance in the investigation. FBI
Director James Comey said the bureau has no evidence yet that the plane
was brought down intentionally.
California Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said there is much that is unknown.
"We
are looking through our intelligence collections to figure out if we
have any images. Do we have any signals intelligence that reveals a
discussion of a plot like this?" Schiff said.
"We're
working with the French to try to figure out is there any information
we have that could shed light on any of the passengers, but there's
nothing yet to confirm the cause of the plane crash."
He said the plane seemed to have broken apart in flight, but why is unclear.
Retired
U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. Robert Latiff, an aerospace expert at the
University of Notre Dame, said that while it is too early to tell for
certain, an accidental structural failure of the highly reliable A320 is
"vanishingly improbable."
He also cast doubt on the possibility of a struggle in the cockpit, saying the crew would have triggered an alarm.
Instead,
he said, "sabotage is possible, and if there were lax controls at
airports and loose hiring and security policies, increasingly likely."
Similarly,
John Goglia, a former U.S. National Transportation Safety Board member,
said early indications point more to a bomb, since it appears that no
mayday call was issued during the abrupt turns. He said the aircraft's
black-box voice and data recorders should hold the answers.
Those
on board, according to EgyptAir and various governments, included 15
French passengers, 30 Egyptians, two Iraqis, one Briton, one Kuwaiti,
one Saudi, one Sudanese, one Chadian, one Portuguese, one Belgian, one
Algerian and two Canadians. Two babies were aboard, officials said.
Among
the passengers, according to employers and officials, were the
Egypt-raised manager of a Procter & Gamble plant in Amiens, France; a
Saudi woman who works at the Saudi Embassy in Cairo; the sister-in-law
of an Egyptian diplomatic official in Paris; and a student at France's
prestigious Saint-Cyr military academy who was heading home to Chad to
mourn his mother.
Whatever caused the crash,
the disaster is likely to deepen Egypt's woes as the country struggles
to revive its ailing economy, particularly its lucrative tourism
industry. It has been battered by the bloodshed and political turmoil
that have engulfed Egypt since the 2011 overthrow of President Hosni
Mubarak.
French President Francois Hollande
held an emergency meeting at the Elysee Palace. He also spoke with
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi by telephone and agreed to
"closely cooperate to establish as soon as possible the circumstances"
surrounding the disaster, according to a statement.
In addition to joining the search-and-rescue operation, France sent a team of accident investigators.
In
Cairo, el-Sissi convened an emergency meeting of the National Security
Council, the country's highest security body. It includes the defense,
foreign and interior ministers and the chiefs of the intelligence
agencies.
In Paris, the city prosecutor's
office opened an investigation. "No hypothesis is favored or ruled out
at this stage," it said in a statement.
Families
of passengers gathered at the Cairo airport, desperate for any news.
Authorities brought doctors to the scene after several distressed family
members collapsed.
"They don't have any
information," lamented Mohamed Ramez, whose in-laws were on the plane.
"But obviously there is little hope."
At De
Gaulle Airport, a man and woman sat at an information desk near the
EgyptAir counter, the woman sobbing into a handkerchief, before they
were led away by police.
The Airbus A320 is a
widely used twin-engine plane that operates on short- and medium-haul
routes. Nearly 4,000 A320s are in use around the world.
The
last deadly crash involving one of the planes was in March 2015, when
one of the pilots of a Germanwings flight deliberately slammed it into
the French Alps, killing all 150 people aboard.
Airbus
said the aircraft in Thursday's disaster was delivered to EgyptAir in
2003 and had logged 48,000 flight hours. The pilot had more than 6,000
hours of flying time, authorities said.
In
March, an EgyptAir plane was hijacked and diverted to Cyprus. A man
described by authorities as mentally unstable was taken into custody.
